2014 began with some big and challenging jobs- we created a full size Clear Cow for Chiobani that is exactly what it sounds like- a completely transparent Hollstein with black spots seemingly floating in thin air. The spots suddenly popped out when we filled with Clear Cow fine styrofoam beads to give the effect of milk being poured into a cow.
We filmed more Stubhub commercials with the Ticket Oak, and sad to say, we later found out that these were the final Stubhub spots to feature our massively popular Ticket Oak Character. To indicate just how popular he was- as of halfway into the campaign back in 2013, he had received more than 32 million Google hits online.
For Meijer, we created two mascot style Purple Cow costumes, one with an animatronic tongue. A new Nissan truck campaign features Bret Michaels as a spokesperson, and we created a series of Bret Michaels bobblehead dolls for these new spots. We have puppeteered some strange things in our time, and for our latest eccentric puppeteering gig, to celebrate that McDonalds now features avocados, we created a Dancing Avocado puppet, and we can reveal that we used a real Avocado -it was the puppeteering rig we created that allowed it to dance far better that the average avocado.
As they say in Hollywood, working with animals can be very difficult, and we were certainly challenged, but we rose to the challenge in creating new, hi-tech Cat Glasses & a Collar for Morris to wear in a new series of online Purina Cat Food commercials.
We were given a rush job for Toyota creating two bronze busts in the NFL bust style, and we made the tight deadline, creating these two beautiful Toyota Busts. We have been noticing an impressive trend developing lately of creating what I call epic mini-movie 90 second commercials - a new Razer Nabu spot is the latest such mini-movie epic, and they hired us on to create 38 Zombie's makeups and many gory but oddly finny effects, including a Zombie skewered by a giant tree/spear lashed to a bicycle, a Zombie Dummy with a hatchet buried deeply in his skull, a knife throw stuck in the forehead effect, and an exploding Zombie head effect.
For our second Elephant Insurance commercial, we created an enormous Mechanic's Overall big enough to fit on the huge Elephant Body Suit we created last year. As if these jobs couldn’t get any bigger, we then provided 15 of our animal puppets and costumes for Avocado's From Mexico ‘First Draft Ever’ commercial, the most we have provided for any job- among them, our Rhinoceros, Polar Bear, Alligator, Raccoon, and Badger. We also created new new animal puppets for the spot- a Dodo Bird, a Sloth Arm, and a Kangaroo Arm. The commercial was a gigantic hit, and it even made the top ten of all time for animal commercials.
We finished off the year with a commercial for Disneyland, creating an animatronic head for the Matterhorn’s Abominable Snowman, and a Puppet version miniature of Disneyland’s Bear Mountain.
This job comes with so many surprises and perks, and this job was no exception- we got the rare privilege to go inside the Matterhorn Structure to take reference photos and measurements of the famous Matterhorn Yeti. Did you know that not only is there an elevator inside the Matterhorn structure, but they also fit a small basketball court in there too!
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Service from behind the scenes since 1980.
